Pakistan: Now or Never?

from India Insight:

In Kashmir, nearly half favour independence

Nearly half of the people living in the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir want their disputed and divided state to become an independent country, according to a poll published by think tank Chatham House.

London-based Chatham House says the poll is the first to be conducted on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC), a military control line that has separated Indian and Pakistani controlled Kashmir since the U.N.-brokered ceasefire between two rivals in 1949.

The poll has produced startling results. On average 44 percent of people in Pakistani-administered Kashmir favoured independence, compared with 43 percent in Indian Kashmir.

But in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley, which is at the centre of the two-decades-old anti-India insurgency, between 75 percent and 95 percent support freedom both from India and Pakistan.

The scenic Himalayan region, which is divided between three nuclear-armed neighbours India, Pakistan and China, comprises of three regions -- Buddhist-dominated Ladakh, Hindu-dominated Jammu and Muslim-majority Kashmir valley.

Twenty one percent of the population said they would vote for the whole of Kashmir to join India, and only 15 percent said they would vote for it to join Pakistan.

At least 80 percent of Kashmiris on both sides of LoC say that the decades-old dispute is very important to them personally.

Between golf and war, Pakistan’s General Kayani’s future is debated

The Pakistan Army prides itself on being an institution which rises above politics and personal ambition, committed to defend the interests of the nation. That this has not always been the case is demonstrated by its history of military coups, and a tendency of past military rulers, from General Zia ul-Haq to former president Pervez Musharraf, to impose a very personal brand of leadership.  Where Zia pushed Pakistan towards hardline Islam, Musharraf aimed at “enlightened moderation” in a country he wanted modelled more on Turkey than on Saudi Arabia.

While no one expects the military to launch another coup, some of that historical memory is feeding into increasingly intense speculation about the future of Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who is due to retire in November.

The general who is arguably Pakistan’s most powerful man has given few clues as to whether he might seek an extension in office beyond November.  But earlier this week Pakistani paper The News reported that the army’s corps commanders wanted him to stay on to see through the battle against Islamist militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. One theory doing the rounds is that Kayani could be appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, with oversight over the air force and navy as well as the army,  and with the role given enhanced powers to ensure he remains in command.

Kayani has been credited with restoring the army’s image in Pakistan - it had suffered from the popular resentment against Musharraf, who stepped down in 2008 . He has also made it clear the military had no intention of taking over the country, although it continues to call the shots on foreign and security policy.  He has overseen some successful operations in the tribal areas and built a reasonable working relationship with the Americans.

A former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Kayani never gives public interviews and therefore remains somewhat inscrutable for those trying to gauge his attitude to the United States or Pakistan’s traditional enemy India.  That said, he has always made his views clear when it seemed that either the United States or the civilian government were about to over-step the boundary into what the Pakistan Army considers its own domain.  A suggestion floated by President Asif Ali Zardari in 2008 that Pakistan adopt a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons was quickly dropped after raising hackles in the army which determinedly guards its control of the nuclear arsenal. 

Kayani spoke out fiercely against a reported incursion by U.S. ground troops in 2008 and in 2009 condemned provisions in the Kerry-Lugar U.S. aid package which called for greater civilian oversight of military appointments and promotions.

The civilian government has given mixed messages about whether it wants Kayani to stay on, but is seen as unlikely to challenge the military or the United States if either or both of them decide they need to keep him in command. In any case, after a rocky start, the civilian government and the military appear to have found – for now at least – an accommodation with each other in which the government relies on the army to fight the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas and knows better than to cross its red lines when it comes to foreign and security policy.

In Pakistan, making sense of the “do more” mantra

White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones and CIA director Leon Panetta are visiting Pakistan to step up pressure on militant groups following this month’s failed car-bombing in New York’s Times Square. But what specifically do they want from Pakistan in what has now become a familiar “do more” mantra from the U.S. administration?  That, as yet, is not entirely clear.

The Washington Post and the New York Times quoted unnamed administration officials as saying Jones and Panetta would press Pakistan to step up its military action against Pakistani and Afghan Taliban militants based in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

“Officials say the administration has been pleased so far with Pakistani cooperation in the investigation (into the failed Times Square bombing), which has focused on any role insurgent groups there might have played in helping to train and otherwise assist bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad,” the Washington Post reported. ”But officials said that Jones and Panetta intend to reiterate to the Pakistanis the importance that the administration places on more aggressive military action against groups allied with al Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA.”

The New York Times quoted a senior administration official as saying that General Jones would not threaten the Pakistanis, but would convey the risks to the country’s relationship with the United States if a deadly terrorist attack originated there. He planned to prod them to take tougher steps against the Taliban and other insurgent groups, the newspaper quoted the official as saying.

“While General Jones’s specific requests were not clear,” according to the newspaper, “the senior administration official said he might ask Pakistan’s military to push harder into North Waziristan, the main base for the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda and other militant groups.”

“There is creeping frustration,” it quoted the administration official as saying.  “Some people are asking, ‘Why are they not going into North Waziristan?’ ” Among the other possible American requests, it said, were more intense surveillance of suspected terrorists and allowing more American military advisers to operate in Pakistan. The United States is also proposing to open a new consulate in Quetta, in southwestern Pakistan, where the C.I.A. would likely have a sizable presence.

The Pakistan Army says it is already stretched fighting in other parts of the tribal areas and is reluctant to rush into a new offensive in North Waziristan until it has consolidated its gains elsewhere.  It launched a major operation in South Waziristan last year, and is now engaged in heavy fighting in Orakzai to the north after clearing out other tribal areas.  As a result it is slowly tightening a noose around North Waziristan.  (The Long War Journal has a good map showing where Orakzai is in relation to North Waziristan.)

Kashmir-beginning the long road back into peace talks

Indian writer A.G. Noorani has just become the latest to weigh in on the parameters of a possible peace deal in Kashmir.  Writing in Dawn newspaper, he argues that  no solution will work unless it is supported by a domestic consensus within each of the three parties involved – India, Pakistan and Kashmir.

“First, no Indian government can accept de-accession of Kashmir and survive even for an hour. Secondly, no government in Pakistan can accept the Line of Control as an international boundary and survive, either. Thirdly, nor will the Kashmiris submit to the partition; and lastly they insist on self-rule,” he writes.

Noorani, like others before him, argues that the best option for consensus lies in a roadmap peace deal sketched out by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then president Pervez Musharraf. This was intended to cut through 60 years of deadlock on the Kashmir dispute by agreeing that there could be no exchange of territory between India and Pakistan on Kashmir, while at the same time making borders irrelevant by opening up the Line of Control (LoC) dividing the region. 

“…  since ‘borders cannot be redrawn’, we can, as Manmohan Singh said on March 24, 2006, ‘work towards making them irrelevant — towards making them just lines on a map’. In effect the state is reunited, de facto though not de jure,” he writes.

He adds this would be coupled with three other points — demilitarisation, self-governance and a joint mechanism for supervision of aspects of Kashmir shared between Pakistan and India.

The proposal has been discussed many times on this blog, most recently here.  It carries with it the advantage of requiring both countries to give ground - a prerequisite for successful negotiations. Pakistan would have to relinquish its insistence  that Kashmiris be allowed a plebiscite to decide their fate, in accordance with UN Resolutions passed in 1948; India would have to acknowledge Pakistan had rights to some oversight over a region which it has long insisted was a non-negotiable and integral part of the country.

That said, there is little evidence to suggest the Singh/Musharraf roadmap for peace was ever quite as far advanced as its supporters suggest. While most analysts agree the two leaders had decided on the broad outlines — no exchange of territory in return for making borders irrelevant — it is unclear how far they had gone in hammering out the details of such potential deal-breakers as the nature of the joint mechanism to supervise Kashmir.

On microfinance in Pakistan

Given the amount of negative news about Pakistan in the last few weeks,  it is good to see a report about something going reasonably well, with this article by the blog Changing up Pakistan on the country’s first microfinance institution. 

Modelled on the Grameen Bank set up in Bangladesh by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohmmad Yunus,  the Kashf Foundation provides loans to Pakistani women to set up small projects which both bring them an income and enhance their status.

“Women in our society do not get the due acknowledgement they deserve for their contribution to the overall economy,” the blog quotes Kashf Foundation founder Roshaneh Zafar as saying.  “Time and time again, during my travels while I worked for the World Bank in Pakistan, women from all walks of life – rural women, urban women, educated women, illiterate women, working women, home makers – would tell me the same thing, that they wanted a better life for themselves and their families, however, they lacked economic opportunity.  This resonated across the country, from when I sat with shy and veiled women in Kalat in Balochistan to when I engaged with highly empowered and articulate women from the plains of the Punjab.

“ The second was related to my own commitment.  I had grown up in a Pakistan where I had not faced any discrimination on the basis of gender.  I was and am strongly committed to the notion that we can build a world free of gender discrimination – that comes with two strategies, empowering women economically (providing them a financial voice) and investing in their social status (through education and health).”

Microfinance has become something of a political football in recent years, in part a victim of its own popularity.  In India, SKS Microfinance last month became the latest in a handful of such institutions to raise money on the stock market,   drawing criticism that it was seeking to profit from poverty.  In this post here on the Huffington Post,  Vivian Norris de Montaigu writes about the pitfalls of microfinance going commercial, quoting Yunus as saying that “we started microcredit to free people from the money-lenders, not to become the new money lenders.”

That said, it came relatively late to Pakistan, and in a country struggling to address the challenges of religious conservatism and Islamist militancy, it’s worth reading  about a project bringing economic empowerment to women.

Among the success stories, Kashf Foundation founder Zafar tells of a woman who began six years ago with a small spindle machine to spool thread, which she then packaged and sold to the local market. Now she has 20 women working for her, while her husband,  seeing the success of her business, left his job as a small time clerk and began working for his wife instead.

Guest contribution-The United States and Pakistan

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The writer is a defence expert and author of two books on the Pakistan Army.

By Brian Cloughley

On 11 May several Frontier Corps soldiers were killed by insurgents in Pakistan’s Orakzai Tribal Agency. Concurrently there was a report that US Secretary of State Clinton had once again been indignantly critical of Pakistan’s supposed lack of effort to rid itself of murderous fanatics seeking to destroy Pakistan and create a so-called ‘Islamic caliphate’ in the region.

Clinton declared her belief that “somewhere in the government [of Pakistan] are people who know where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda is [sic], where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is [sic], and we expect more cooperation to help us bring to justice, capture or kill those who attacked us on 9/11.”

The psychotic Mullah Omar hates America, to be sure; but for the US Secretary of State to assert that Omar and his adherents were responsible for the atrocities of 9/11 is absurd.

Pakistan’s dead soldiers included Lieutenants Murad and Hakimullah, Hawaldar Imran and Sepoys Gohar, Rehman Gul, Amjad Ali, Arif, Zahid, Munir, Wasti Khan and Nauman, and they died while fighting America’s war. You can’t carry support much further.

But in spite of such sacrifices Mrs Clinton demands “more cooperation” from Pakistan.

Guest contribution-A tribute to British democracy

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The writer is the High Commissioner of Pakistan to Britain.

By Wajid Shamsul Hasan

It is, no doubt, a tribute to British democracy that all sections of its society are represented in parliament. For us it is also heartening to note that out of nine Muslim members elected in the May 6 election, seven are of Pakistani origin (five belonging to Labour and two from the Conservatives). For the first time in British history two women of Pakistani origin have made it to parliament. Compared to previous elections, this time three more Pakistani MPs will be sitting in the House of Commons.

Britain and Pakistan are bound by a long shared history, which at times becomes nostalgic amongst the senior citizens who in their youth had some kind of interaction with our part of the world. But the migration of Pakistanis and Kashmiris to Britain during the past six decades has certainly created a human bridge between the two countries. One can see a growing interaction in the cultural, economic and political arenas, which makes Pakistan and the UK favourite destinations for the people of the two countries, especially those who have their origins in Pakistan and Kashmir.  For first-time visitors from Pakistan, London hardly represents an alien city given the fact that almost a million South Asians, including 50 percent Pakistanis, live in this city and immediately connect to their fellow Pakistanis through common language, food and clothes.

In such an environment, it is a matter of great satisfaction that British society has afforded the opportunity to the people of Pakistani and Kashmiri origin to be represented by their own people. This also shows the admirable tolerance shown by the British people and the government towards minorities and serves as a lesson to freedom-loving people throughout the world that in a democratic society, a fair representation of different interest groups is the best guarantee for stability and progress of any society.

It is incumbent upon the Pakistani diaspora to value the British democratic system and take measures to address the problems faced by the community. The election of Pakistani and Kashmiri members to the House of Commons and in councils across Britain is reflective of their keen interest in British political life. As a fellow Pakistani I am proud of their success. It is a recognition of their hard work and their acceptability in British society. I am confident that with perseverance they would prove to be an asset to British political life.

But, I have a word of caution: We in Pakistan are passing through a sensitive phase of defeating extremists and terrorists. Please help us in neutralizing the forces of obscurantism and pay attention to your youth to stop them from falling prey to extremist propaganda. We all know that British youth of Pakistani origin are getting radicalized within the United Kingdom. Unlike some rhetorical claims that three-fourth of terror plots on Britain originate from Pakistan, it is Britain itself where we have to find the causes of radicalization and their remedies. Pakistan is not a place for extremist baptism; we have made them run and we will not rest till they are neutralized.

from Afghan Journal:

Guest Column: Getting Obama’s Afghan policy back on track

(C. Uday Bhaskar is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst. The views expressed in the column are his own).

By C. Uday Bhaskar

The May 12 summit meeting in the White House between visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his host, U.S. President Barack Obama comes against the backdrop of the mercifully aborted May 1 terrorist bombing incident in New York's Times Square.

From the barrage of news and commentary that floods various media outlets here in Washington DC, it is evident that the Obama Af-Pak policy unveiled with considerable fanfare last year will be in for detailed and contested policy review.

Immediate U.S. interests apart - including the Obama second term, the stakes for the long-term stability of the entire southern Asian region and the troubled Muslim populace in the scattered diaspora ranging from North America to west Europe are immense and complex.

Afghanistan came into global focus with the tragic enormity of September 11, 2001 when it was under the control of the Taliban and the obscurantist, anti-liberal ideology espoused by this group had earlier impacted India's security interests in the December 1999 aircraft hijacking episode.

With Karzai off to Washington, Taliban talks back in focus

“The effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory—as the administration in which I served had to learn from bitter experience.”

The quote is from Henry Kissinger on Vietnam but you could just as easily apply it to the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan of aiming to weaken the Taliban enough to bring them to the negotiating table. And unfashionable as it is to compare Vietnam to Afghanistan (it was hopelessly overdone last year), it does encapsulate one of the many paradoxes of the American approach to the Taliban.

If, so the argument goes, the United States is willing to reach an eventual political settlement with the Taliban, why does it keep launching fresh military offensives? Or alternatively, if it has no intention of making a deal, why has President Barack Obama promised to start drawing down troops in 2011, signalling to the Taliban that all they need to do is wait it out until the Americans leave?

In this 2008 Newsweek article which carries remarkable resonance today, Kissinger, a former National Security Adviser, sets out the risks of a strategy that is somewhere between war and peace.

“When the United States goes to war, it should be able to describe to itself how it defines victory and how it proposes to achieve it. Or else how it proposes to end its military engagement and by what diplomacy. In Vietnam, America sent combat forces on behalf of a general notion of credibility and in pursuit of a negotiation whose content was never defined,” he writes.

He then faults previous administrations for assuming that once the U.S. military thwarted the North Vietnamese, ”an undefined compromise would emerge through diplomacy—in effect, a strategy seeking stalemate, not victory. But stalemate violates the maxim that the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. “

“The purpose of war is victory. Stalemate is a last resort, not a desirable strategic objective.” (my italics)

Could you pass bin Laden to the left please?

Whatever Osama bin Laden once aspired to, it was not to be passed around the table like a bottle of port  in the British Raj nor worse, handed on quickly  in a child’s game of Pass the Parcel. Yet that is the fate which for now appears to be chasing him.

For years, the default assumption has been that bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last month, I heard a Pakistani official say that bin Laden was last heard of in Pakistan’s traditional enemy India in 2003 – in Bangalore and Hyderabad to be precise -before he disappeared without trace.  Then Fox News came up with a story about how he was living in luxury in Iran. Not to be outdone, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad then suggested he was more likely to be hiding in Washington.

Anyone want to guess where bin Laden is reported to be next?  He definitely seems to be acquiring the taint of the unwelcome guest.

That said, and to be briefly serious, you can draw two tentative conclusions.  Either you say that the man identified with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington is no longer the icon and threat he once was. Or you say that the man himself was never the real threat, but rather a symbol of the cause (itself subject to much debate) which both preceded bin Laden and will also outlive him.

Either way, how many people out there still believe that taking out bin Laden would change things on the ground? Probably quite a few – but how many compared to those who believed this immediately after 9/11? The answer to that question would tell historians quite a lot about how attitudes have changed over the past nine years.